THE TOTALIZING NARRATIVE: FOUR LATIN AMERICAN CASE STUDIES (EUCLIDES DA CUNHA, MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, PERU, JOAO GUIMARAES ROSA, BRAZIL, ALEJO CARPENTIER, CUBA)

The theoretical work of Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, and of Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, supply the main conceptual tools for my analysis of four major Latin American texts: Os Sertoes (Euclides da Cunha), La guerra del fin del mundo (Mario Vargas Llosa), Grande Sertao: Veredas (Joao Guimaraes Rosa) and El siglo de las luces (Alejo Carpentier). These texts provide the basis for an analytic discussion of the concept of the "totalizing narrative." I explore how these narratives orchestrate a variety of master codes (aesthetic, historical, metaphysical, and scientific) in order to articulate the connections between: an individual and a collective realm history and nature writing and experience science and testimony.In Chapter Two, my analysis of Grande Sertao: Veredas defines the totalizing project as the creation of a literary language positioned between a unified collective realm of story-telling and an isolationist individual sphere of novelistic worldview. In his unravelling of both a collective and an individual past, the narrator-protagonist Riobaldo shapes what I have termed a "poetics of saudade," structured as an elegaic lament of loss perpetuated by the desire to recover and interpret both a personal past and a previous collective history.The final chapter is devoted to a study of El siglo de las luces. In the particular context of the French revolution in the Caribbean, El siglo's totalizing project, I contend, elaborates a "poetics of rediscovery" that re-interprets Latin American history and cultural identity and promotes a tentative linkage between nature and history.Chapter One is devoted to a comparative study of Os Sertoes and La guerra del fin del mundo in relation to their interpretation of the historical messianic event of Canudos. I contend that Euclides' two master discourses, science and testimony, fail to explain Canudos. Instead, his text presents the breakdown of a totalizing scientific discourse because his testimonial account contradicts his initial scientific postulations. La guerra's totalizing project consists of a relativistic and skeptical apprehension of history as a tragedy of errors enacted by fanatics who adhere blindly to ideological beliefs.